If you’ve read my previous Course Reviews, you’ll probably remember that Integrated 2 was hell for a lot of students taking that path. Every teacher in Integrated 2 always justified their harsh grading with Oh, you think we’re grading hard? Wait until you get to Integrated 3. They grade so much more difficult than we do! The material there is incredibly difficult, and you won’t last a day there if you don’t get used to what we’re doing!
So after all of that, struggling to get an A in Integrated 2B, doing extra shifts for months… did that actually save me from the supposed torture that the Integrated 2 teachers said were to come in Integrated 3?
Nope. It didn’t save me.
Not because I didn’t work hard enough, but because there was nothing in Integrated 3 for me to be saved from. I mean, sure, I guess the hard work I put over the summer gave me some advantage, but seriously— my Integrated 2 teachers really overstated how difficult Integrated 3 would be. There’s not much I can say about it… everything about this class is easy, and I genuinely think now that taking Integrated 3 first probably would have been fine. It turns out the teachers were better too… the common consensus between most students in Del Norte is that all the teachers of Int 3 are far more effective and nicer, and having seen what each course is like, I can certainly agree with that to a very high extent.
The first entire half of the trimester ended up just being Integrated 2 review— easy stuff like parabolas, quadratics, and function translation. Some of this I knew from as far back as Integrated 2, so the smarter kids who got the hang of this pretty quickly like me got quite impatient with the speed of this class. To make things even easier, the tests we were given often handed out extra credit points, so even messing up quite badly on a test could still be saved to an extent if you got the extra questions right.
The only difference between Integrated 3 and 2 that Integrated 3 had these things called Learning Targets which consisted of small, three question quizzes that tested your knowledge on whatever concept we were currently covering. The three questions generally increased in difficulty as you went along them, so the first one was usually a joke, and second one typically a little harder, and the third was generally an application of the process, which was almost always the mistake that most people made on a test.
If you have strong math skills, then most of your learning would revolve around these two things: logs and trigonometry. Let’s start with logarithms. A logarithm is very similar to an exponent, which is just repeated muiltiplication. For example, let’s say you have the exponent 33. The value of that exponent would also be 3*3*3, because you want to multiply the base, 3, three times. Similarly, 4 to the power of 8 would be four multiplied together eight times, and is notated with 48. But what if we tried to do something a little different? Let’s say you have the value 256 and the number two. What power do you raise 2 to get 256? That’s how a log works. All you do is take the log of the base value, the number you want to set it to the power to, and the answer will be your power. In this case, you raise to the power of 8 to get 256 and is notated as
28 = 256 and log2(256) = 8. (Man I really hope this notation still works while I’m copy-pasting it onto the website later)
Next up, trig. For the most part, a lot of the stuff on the trigonometry unit here was just a review of the previous trig episode, so if you want to learn more about that, just go back to my trigonometry Course Review. I think there’s a very strong argument that can be made that the Trig unit is simpler in 3A because it never covered the cotangent, secant, and cosecant parts of it— only the tangent, cosine, and sine. I think a lot of that is simply because back in my freshman year, it was common for people to skip trigonometry if they wanted to get around math. The only new thing here was a unit for measuring degrees called radians, which are basically just muiltiples of pi used to get certain angles. Most people caught onto this pretty quick.
Generally, learning in 3A is pretty straight forward and very similar to what the teachers in Integrated 2 would teach us to do. The teachers almost always taught using slides and whiteboards, which were extremely useful. Often worksheets would be passed out, probably at a higher level than what we had in Integrated 2, but they were also far easier.
Overall, this class is pretty easy as long as you’re putting in good effort.